TOWARDS A DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC
of logic and of sentiment, usually blended into a fervour
of quasi-religious enthusiasm. The Democrat is usually an
emotionalist, a sentimentalist in both the good and the bad
sense of that much ill-used term ; he is a mystic, and his politics
are to him a faith that often replaces religion; his belief in
the Republico-Democratic organization of society is largely a
matter of intuition, of a heart having its reasons that Reason
knoweth not—a faith that made him risk prison, exile and
deportation, and that kept alive during the four years of bitter
disillusionment that were the Second Republic and the
eighteen years of the half opera bouffe^ half tragedy that we call
the Second Empire.
It is this emotional quality of his politics that separates
so sharply the Democrat from the Liberal. Close as some
Democrats may have been to some " advanced " Liberals,
often advocating virtually identical programmes, there was
nevertheless an irreducible difference of temperament, ulti-
mately amounting to different views of man, of his nature, of
the world in general. The Democrat was prepared to trust the
ordinary man, the Liberal was not. It could almost be said that
the Democrat followed Rousseau in his belief in the goodness
of human nature and the Liberal the Benthamite idea that man
is essentially selfish and that the function of government is to
prevent the selfishness of each from getting into the way of
others. This close feeling for the people makes Republicanism
more akin in its origin to Socialist than to Liberal thought,
and explains indeed the close alliance which has always existed
between the Radical1 and Socialist parties, neither being ever
able to acquiesce, even by a negative abstention, in a policy
that would mean the crushing of the other. The Republican of
1848 is often more an undeveloped Socialist than an advanced
Liberal; and what differentiates him from the Socialists is often
a matter of tactics rather than of principle: he believes first in
the conquest of political weapons: the vote, the abolition of
the hereditary principle, and relegates to a distant future the
economic reorganization of society which is the Socialist's
1 Taking the Radical party of our own day as the real heir of the Republican
tradition of the thirties and forties of the nineteenth century.
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